4 ms·

The problem Sabine tries to communicate is that reality is different from what the cash-heads behind main commercial models are trying to portray. They push the

by gloosx 2y ago

The problem Sabine tries to communicate is that reality is different from what the cash-heads behind main commercial models are trying to portray. They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition, when in reality, they’ve just optimised prediction algorithms on an unprecedented scale. They are trying to say that they created Intelligence, which is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, but we all know the only real Intelligence they are creating is the collection of information of military or political value. The technology is indeed amazing and very amusing, but like all the good things in the hands of corporate overlords, it will be slowly turning into profit-milking abomination.

noufalibrahim 2y ago
Much as i agree with the point about overhyping from companies, I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view if she acknowledged the merits of the technology. Yes, it hallucinates and if you replace your brain with one of these things, you won't last too long. However, it can do things which, in the hands of someone experienced, are very empowering. And it doesn't take an expert to see the potential. As it stands, it sounds like a case of "it's great in practice but the important question is how good it is in theory."
- nottorp 2y ago
  If it works for you... I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines, but that's because search has been entshittified more than because a LLM is better. However 90% of the marketing material about them is simply disgusting. The bigwigs sound like they're spreading a new religion, and most enthusiasts sound like they're new converts to some sect. If you're marketing it as a tool, fine. If you're marketing it as the third and fourth coming of $DEITY, get lost.
  - noufalibrahim 2y ago
    I completely agree about the marketing material. I'm not sure about 90% but that's not something I have a strong opinion on. The stream from the bigwigs is the same song being played in a different tune and I'm inoculated to it. I'm not marketing it. I'm not a marketer. I'm a developer trying to create an informed opinion on its utility and the marketing speak you criticize is far away from the truth. The problem is this notion that it's just completely bullshit. The way it's worded irks me. "I genuinely don't understand...". It's quite easy to see the utility and acknowledging that doesn't, in any way, detract from valid criticisms of the technology and the people who peddle.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Exactly. It’s so strange to read so many comments that boil down to “because some marketing people are over-promising, I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things”
      - nottorp 2y ago
        Don't forget that before "AI" there was crypto. Same attitude among their promoters. So someone who isn't already invested can genuinely draw the conclusion they're similar and not worth the time. Edit: oh wait >because some marketing people are over-promising all "AI" marketing people that I've seen. Ok 98%. And all my LLM info is from what gets posted on HN. > I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things "I will retaliate by cataloguing them as pathological liars and not waste my time with them any more".
        brookst 2y ago
        But it’s not the marketers building the products. This is like saying “because the car salesman lied about this Prius’ gas mileage, I’ll retaliate by refusing to believe hybrids are any better than pure ICE cars and will buy a pickup”. It hurts nobody but the person choosing ignorance.
        nottorp 2y ago
  - nulbyte 2y ago
    > I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines... The problem for me is that I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone. Non-niche problems are usually already solved. Like search. Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. I have no such problems with my SearxNG instance.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      > I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone Tough luck. On the other hand, we're still justified in asking for money to do the niche problems with our fleshy brains, right? In spite of the likes of Altman saying every week that we'll be obsoleted in 5 years by his products. Like ... cold fusion? Always 5 years away? [I have more hope for cold fusion than these "AIs" though.] > Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. No they became garbage significantly before "AI". Google at least has gradually reduced the number of results returned and expanded the search scope to the point that you want a reminder of the i2c api syntax on a raspberry pi and they return 20 beginner tutorial results that show you how to unpack the damn thing and do the first login instead.
lnenad 2y ago
> They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition This is your interpretation of what these companies are saying. I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? How many things from today when brought back into 2010 would make the person using it make it feel like they're being tricked or pranked? We already take them for granted even thought they've only been around for less than half of a decade. LLMs aren't a catch all solution to the world's problems; or something that is going to help us in every facet of our lives; or an accelerator for every industry that exists out there. But at no point in history could you talk to your phone about general topics, get information, practice language skills, build an assistant that teaches your kid about the basics of science, use something to accelerate your work in a many different ways etc... Looking at llms shouldn't be boolean, it shouldn't be between they're the best thing ever invented vs they're useless; but it seems like everyone presents the issue in this manner and Sabine is part of that problem.
- gloosx 2y ago
  No major company directly states "We have created human-like intelligence," they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR. >I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? 1. DeepMind researchers: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 2. "GPT-4 is not AGI, but it does exhibit more general intelligence than previous models." - Sam Altman 3. Musk has claimed that AI is on the path to "understanding the universe." His branding of Tesla's self-driving AI as "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) also misleadingly suggests a level of autonomous reasoning that doesn't exist. 4. Meta's AI chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has repeatedly said they are working on giving AI "common sense" and "world models" similar to how humans think. >Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. 60 years ago. So as you can see, us humans are not too hard to fool with this.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
I hate to bring an ad hominem into this, but Sabine is a YouTube influencer now. That's her current career. So I'd assume this Tweet storm is also pushing a narrative on its own, because that's part of doing the work she chose to do to earn a living. Pinch of salt & all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mdp2021 2y ago
  What you have done there is to discount statements that may build up a narrative - and still may remain fair... On which basis? Possibly they do not match your own narrative?
- ben_w 2y ago
  While true, I think this is more likely a question of framing or anchoring — I am continuously impressed and surprised by how good AI is, but I recognise all the criticisms she's making here. They're amazing, but at the same time they make very weird mistakes. They actually remind me of myself, as I experience being a native English speaker now living in Berlin and attempting to use a language I mainly learned as an adult. I can often appear competent in my use of the language, but then I'll do something stupid like asking someone in the office if we have a "Gabelstapler" I can borrow — Gabelstapler is "forklift truck", I meant to ask for a stapler, which is "Tacker" or "Hefter", and I somehow managed to make this mistake directly after carefully looking up the word. (Even this is a big improvement for me, as I started off like Officer Crabtree from Allo' Allo').
brookst 2y ago
You lay the rhetoric on so thick (“cash heads”, “pushing the narrative”, “corporate overlords”, “profit-making abomination”) that it’s hard to understand your actual claim. Are you trying to say that LLMs are useful now but you think that will stop being the case at some point in the future?
- gloosx 2y ago
  I was trying to say that LLMs will not become more than what they are, especially since they are tools for profit in the modern system. It’s like an iPhone — the latest iPhone 16 Pro is, of course, better than the iPhone 3G, but conceptually, there is nothing new. The same goes for LLMs. In 15 years, we will probably have the same hallucinating LLM, just 10% thinner and 20% faster. The tech industry, especially big corporations, doesn’t chase innovation; it chases repeatable, predictable profit.
tim333 2y ago
LLMs seem akin to parts of human cognition, maybe the initial fast thinking bit when ideas pop up in a second of two. But any human writing a review with links to sources would look them up and check the are they right ones that match the initial idea. Current LLMs don't seem to do that, at least the ones Sabine complains about. Akin to human cognition but still a few bricks short of a load, as it were.
abecedarius 2y ago
If it's just cash-heads pushing a narrative, where do Bengio and Hinton fit? Stuart Russell? Doug Hofstadter? I mean fine, argue that they're mistaken to be concerned, if that's your belief. But dismissing it all as obvious shilling is not that argument.
- gloosx 2y ago
  If we're calling out names, what about Roger Penrose, John Searle, Stuart Hameroff, Hubert Dreyfus, Henry Stapp? These are very intelligent people and I suggest to get acquainted with their work. Neural scaling laws are real and no matter if you put into training 10e-8 petaFLOP/days of compute or 200000 petaFLOP/days you will hit irreducible error constant at Efficient Compute Frontier. I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.
  - abecedarius 2y ago
    Calling out names was an argument just for not dismissing AI as a thing "everyone knows" is fake. Above you wrote "we all know the only real Intelligence ... is" as your support for attributing venial motives to people taking AI progress seriously. OK, now I know your basis for that claim. I've read three of the guys you mention, agree they're intelligent and except for Searle have some good things to say. But it's really unconvincing as support for an AI-is-fake claim, and especially for an everyone-knows claim.

by gloosx 2y ago

noufalibrahim 2y ago

Much as i agree with the point about overhyping from companies, I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view if she acknowledged the merits of the technology. Yes, it hallucinates and if you replace your brain with one of these things, you won't last too long. However, it can do things which, in the hands of someone experienced, are very empowering. And it doesn't take an expert to see the potential. As it stands, it sounds like a case of "it's great in practice but the important question is how good it is in theory."

nottorp 2y ago
If it works for you... I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines, but that's because search has been entshittified more than because a LLM is better. However 90% of the marketing material about them is simply disgusting. The bigwigs sound like they're spreading a new religion, and most enthusiasts sound like they're new converts to some sect. If you're marketing it as a tool, fine. If you're marketing it as the third and fourth coming of $DEITY, get lost.
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  I completely agree about the marketing material. I'm not sure about 90% but that's not something I have a strong opinion on. The stream from the bigwigs is the same song being played in a different tune and I'm inoculated to it. I'm not marketing it. I'm not a marketer. I'm a developer trying to create an informed opinion on its utility and the marketing speak you criticize is far away from the truth. The problem is this notion that it's just completely bullshit. The way it's worded irks me. "I genuinely don't understand...". It's quite easy to see the utility and acknowledging that doesn't, in any way, detract from valid criticisms of the technology and the people who peddle.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Exactly. It’s so strange to read so many comments that boil down to “because some marketing people are over-promising, I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things”
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Don't forget that before "AI" there was crypto. Same attitude among their promoters. So someone who isn't already invested can genuinely draw the conclusion they're similar and not worth the time. Edit: oh wait >because some marketing people are over-promising all "AI" marketing people that I've seen. Ok 98%. And all my LLM info is from what gets posted on HN. > I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things "I will retaliate by cataloguing them as pathological liars and not waste my time with them any more".
      - brookst 2y ago
        But it’s not the marketers building the products. This is like saying “because the car salesman lied about this Prius’ gas mileage, I’ll retaliate by refusing to believe hybrids are any better than pure ICE cars and will buy a pickup”. It hurts nobody but the person choosing ignorance.
        nottorp 2y ago
- nulbyte 2y ago
  > I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines... The problem for me is that I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone. Non-niche problems are usually already solved. Like search. Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. I have no such problems with my SearxNG instance.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone Tough luck. On the other hand, we're still justified in asking for money to do the niche problems with our fleshy brains, right? In spite of the likes of Altman saying every week that we'll be obsoleted in 5 years by his products. Like ... cold fusion? Always 5 years away? [I have more hope for cold fusion than these "AIs" though.] > Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. No they became garbage significantly before "AI". Google at least has gradually reduced the number of results returned and expanded the search scope to the point that you want a reminder of the i2c api syntax on a raspberry pi and they return 20 beginner tutorial results that show you how to unpack the damn thing and do the first login instead.

lnenad 2y ago

> They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition This is your interpretation of what these companies are saying. I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? How many things from today when brought back into 2010 would make the person using it make it feel like they're being tricked or pranked? We already take them for granted even thought they've only been around for less than half of a decade. LLMs aren't a catch all solution to the world's problems; or something that is going to help us in every facet of our lives; or an accelerator for every industry that exists out there. But at no point in history could you talk to your phone about general topics, get information, practice language skills, build an assistant that teaches your kid about the basics of science, use something to accelerate your work in a many different ways etc... Looking at llms shouldn't be boolean, it shouldn't be between they're the best thing ever invented vs they're useless; but it seems like everyone presents the issue in this manner and Sabine is part of that problem.

gloosx 2y ago
No major company directly states "We have created human-like intelligence," they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR. >I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? 1. DeepMind researchers: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 2. "GPT-4 is not AGI, but it does exhibit more general intelligence than previous models." - Sam Altman 3. Musk has claimed that AI is on the path to "understanding the universe." His branding of Tesla's self-driving AI as "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) also misleadingly suggests a level of autonomous reasoning that doesn't exist. 4. Meta's AI chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has repeatedly said they are working on giving AI "common sense" and "world models" similar to how humans think. >Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. 60 years ago. So as you can see, us humans are not too hard to fool with this.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

I hate to bring an ad hominem into this, but Sabine is a YouTube influencer now. That's her current career. So I'd assume this Tweet storm is also pushing a narrative on its own, because that's part of doing the work she chose to do to earn a living. Pinch of salt & all.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mdp2021 2y ago
What you have done there is to discount statements that may build up a narrative - and still may remain fair... On which basis? Possibly they do not match your own narrative?
ben_w 2y ago
While true, I think this is more likely a question of framing or anchoring — I am continuously impressed and surprised by how good AI is, but I recognise all the criticisms she's making here. They're amazing, but at the same time they make very weird mistakes. They actually remind me of myself, as I experience being a native English speaker now living in Berlin and attempting to use a language I mainly learned as an adult. I can often appear competent in my use of the language, but then I'll do something stupid like asking someone in the office if we have a "Gabelstapler" I can borrow — Gabelstapler is "forklift truck", I meant to ask for a stapler, which is "Tacker" or "Hefter", and I somehow managed to make this mistake directly after carefully looking up the word. (Even this is a big improvement for me, as I started off like Officer Crabtree from Allo' Allo').

brookst 2y ago

You lay the rhetoric on so thick (“cash heads”, “pushing the narrative”, “corporate overlords”, “profit-making abomination”) that it’s hard to understand your actual claim. Are you trying to say that LLMs are useful now but you think that will stop being the case at some point in the future?

gloosx 2y ago
I was trying to say that LLMs will not become more than what they are, especially since they are tools for profit in the modern system. It’s like an iPhone — the latest iPhone 16 Pro is, of course, better than the iPhone 3G, but conceptually, there is nothing new. The same goes for LLMs. In 15 years, we will probably have the same hallucinating LLM, just 10% thinner and 20% faster. The tech industry, especially big corporations, doesn’t chase innovation; it chases repeatable, predictable profit.

tim333 2y ago

LLMs seem akin to parts of human cognition, maybe the initial fast thinking bit when ideas pop up in a second of two. But any human writing a review with links to sources would look them up and check the are they right ones that match the initial idea. Current LLMs don't seem to do that, at least the ones Sabine complains about. Akin to human cognition but still a few bricks short of a load, as it were.

abecedarius 2y ago

If it's just cash-heads pushing a narrative, where do Bengio and Hinton fit? Stuart Russell? Doug Hofstadter? I mean fine, argue that they're mistaken to be concerned, if that's your belief. But dismissing it all as obvious shilling is not that argument.

gloosx 2y ago
If we're calling out names, what about Roger Penrose, John Searle, Stuart Hameroff, Hubert Dreyfus, Henry Stapp? These are very intelligent people and I suggest to get acquainted with their work. Neural scaling laws are real and no matter if you put into training 10e-8 petaFLOP/days of compute or 200000 petaFLOP/days you will hit irreducible error constant at Efficient Compute Frontier. I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.
- abecedarius 2y ago
  Calling out names was an argument just for not dismissing AI as a thing "everyone knows" is fake. Above you wrote "we all know the only real Intelligence ... is" as your support for attributing venial motives to people taking AI progress seriously. OK, now I know your basis for that claim. I've read three of the guys you mention, agree they're intelligent and except for Searle have some good things to say. But it's really unconvincing as support for an AI-is-fake claim, and especially for an everyone-knows claim.